- after Gregory Pardlo
It was leap year, on a Thursday, I was born

                upstate New York, Borsch Belt small town.

To a family of farmers, where covered bridges crossed

                creeks. Twenty miles to the racetrack in

Monticello, our nearest city, where father worked

                for an air conditioning installation firm.

The Evergreens of the Catskills.

                A mother off seeking four-leaf clovers.

Born to arrowheads and quartz, to blueberry

                bushes in back fields. I ran to frogs

and salamanders across stone fences

                through wild woods, no eyes followed me.

It was during the cold war red scare, but I,

                a wild barn child was unaware. Daddy’s little girl

I wore patent leather shoes at Easter and

                blue velvet at Christmas. The cameo necklace,

Mother gave me, fell into a stream. I was a wild thing

                from go, feeling the velocity of wind. The night

I came a fierce push. I was born clear white,

                pastel perfect skin, with spit-on Irish blood

and German ancestry I was told to never

                acknowledge by a direct line uncle. The year

I came, there was a storm brewing in the guts

                of women to have climaxes they’d never reached.

There was a surge to land on the moon. The

                Atom bomb was introduced from Britain. Born

in the year of the Dragon, I knew it would be rocky

                not a song in the rain, nor the cotton candy

fun world where mother resided.
Julene Tripp Weaver is our Poet in Residence for March.


Previously: Ordinary Essentials.